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Thank you to those that participated in our Parents Club Meeting event on January 31, 2018 held in the atrium! A special thank you goes out to Patti Fabrizio for helping to promote and coordinate the event.

The forum presented an opportunity for parents of the Saint Patrick community to learn more about current and future doings from the principal’s prospective. In addition, families were given an opportunity to ask questions and further discuss other issues that needed clarification or additional explanation.

Below is a summary of the agenda items
:

Message from the Principal

Recent news coverage

As you may be aware, there have been news reports regarding the flu at Saint Patrick. I apologize that the news story has caused you concern. Unfortunately, not all the story was completely factual.

The current strain of flu is causing issues for everyone around the country including schools, businesses, etc. While Saint Patrick was used as an example, the flu has been more prevalent than in the past and is impacting more people including many schools in the Chicagoland area.

Students were absent for a variety of reasons, and while the flu was the most common reason given for their absences, there were students who were not in school for reasons that were not health related. We did and will continue to recommend, as we do in any cases with illness, to both our students and faculty that they should remain home if they do not feel well.

Saint Patrick is cleaned and disinfected each night to minimize any germs being transferred. We continue to monitor the health and well-being of our students and faculty and will notify you of any updates, if needed.

Tax Credit Scholarship Update

Many of our families have applied for the various SGOs (Scholarship Granting Organizations) since applications opened on January 22. These scholarships will be instrumental in helping current and future Shamrock families. We are eternally grateful to the donors and corporate dollars that are helping to fund this program. For an update on which SGOs are available to apply to, please click on the following link:
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Results of test day

We had 267 prospective students take the entrance exam, which included the make-up date. This is up 20% from the previous year’s test numbers. I thanked the parents for all their help and asked for their continued support as we try to solidify the student’s commitment to Saint Patrick High School.

Congrats to our Bowling, Chess, and Robotics Teams!

Our Bowling team competed at the IHSA Bowling State Tournament on January 26 – 27 and our Chess Team recently qualified to compete down state February 9-11. Our Robotics team competed at the First Tech Challenge hosted at St. Pat’s and finished 3rd overall! Robotics teacher, Kori Bowns, provided the structure for Team Captains to lead their teams of student engineers.

True story: When I was in middle school, my mother sat my brother and me down at the dining room table to give us lessons from Emily Post's big blue bible called
Etiquette
. Fold your napkin when you leave the table. Start with the silverware on the outside and work your way in. A lot of those lessons still apply today. But you know what we don't need? Those century-old tropes being applied to how we live our digital lives.

Photo sharing itself is a huge topic. The etiquette of tagging and posting raises questions about what's respectful, and whether to ask permission before posting.Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn—I'll talk a look at the major sites and their manners and subcultures. Online gaming is one of the biggest internet communities around, with its own rules of engagement. Dating is fast on its heels, though, and we'll talk about the art of finding love online. Never far from anyone's mind (thanks to that smartphone!) is work. Navigating job interviews that might pull up your Facebook page right then and there and avoiding accidental Twitter overshares are just a few of the things that are part of what it means to assess and be smart about digital appropriateness in the workplace today.

A few questions come to mind after reading that. First, what is LinkedIn subculture? Is it like weird Twitter but for professionals? Second, is this how
Martha Stewart will navigate Match.com
?And if the line about
that smartphone
didn't kill you, let's get into Senning's know-how on a couple of familiar platforms for those who don't, well, know how: